How We Decide What To Build With Limited Resources

Using the Impact Effort Prioritisation Matrix to help us decide what new features to build.

“Design is a process of making dreams come true.”
–The Universal Traveler

As a product owner, product manager, UX, UI person, designer in Startup, we’re facing lots of problems but also got tones of ideas to seek a way to run and grow the business. That’s a challenges for us to decide what to build to find product market fit and making everybody dreams come true.

Before we define what features and product we’re going to build, we need to know our customer. In Cloudbreakr, we constantly observe our user from online community, forums, workplace, sales meetings, site reviews, support inboxes, Facebook. What questions do they encounter? What do they tend to do every day? What mentalities tend to hold them back? What haunts them? How do they speak? What’s their biggest challenge? What would bring them their biggest joy?

Cloudbreakr‘s feature and problem list

In Cloudbreakr, although we don’t have much resources, we keep sharing the problems, insights and ideas. It is important to documents those ideas and reviews it once a months. I like using Google Documents to do the product backlog when ideas are just an idea stage. Then I will copy and paste the ideas into the our Feature/Problems List, print it out and cut it into a small cards before the product design sprint meeting.

Cloudbreakr‘s feature and problem list

Solve Problems and Make Decisions Exercise

I take one of the methodology called Impact/Effort Matrix to help us make decisions and prioritise the features to build. It is important to let key team members to join this meeting like engineer, designer, sales & marketing, and make sure everyone understand the impact and effort of the features that we are going to build.

The Impact Effort Prioritisation Matrix (also called the Action Priority Matrix) is a decision-making exercise allowing its users to categorize ideas according to the effort needed and the potential impact.

Read more: https://www.tuzzit.com/en/canvas/impact_effort_prioritisation_matrix

Cloudbreakr Impact/Effort Matrix Worksheet

The four sections of the matrix are:

  • QUICK WINS (HIGH IMPACT, LOW EFFORT)
    These are the most attractive ideas/projects, giving you a good return for relatively little effort.

Cloudbreakr Impact/Effort Matrix Result

Key takeaways

At the end of the meeting, we’ll leave with: What we’re going to build; Why we’re doing it (problems you’re trying to solve) and What success looks like(quantitatively and qualitatively). Then I will document it immediately and send to every team members. This document helps keep myself and my team focused and prevent design creep: if it doesn’t solve the problem or meet the goals or impact, it doesn’t go into the product development sprint. The next step I will start writing the Job Story into Teambition and planing for the next development sprint. 🤞🏽

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Chester Ip / UX Design / HK

Written by

Product design / UX strategy & research / Design methodologies. www.ipyiulam.work

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